Which thinker claimed drama is language under such high pressure of feeling that the words carry a necessary and immediate connotation of gesture?

• A. Peter Brook
• B. George Steiner
• C. Soliloquy
• D. Brecht

Answer: (B)

The idea being tested is how drama makes language carry the immediacy of gesture through intense feeling. George Steiner is the thinker who articulates this view: in his sense of drama, speech is under such pressure from emotion that words become a kind of gesture—loaded with nonverbal meaning that audiences instinctively read as action. That makes his position the best fit for the statement, because it foregrounds the transformative power of language in theatre, turning spoken words into expressive, gestural signs.

Peter Brook is renowned for his ideas about theater form and the relation between space, actor, and audience, but not this particular claim about language becoming gesture under pressure of feeling. Brecht centers on distancing effects and social critique in epic theatre, which shifts how we experience language and performance. The term Soliloquy is a dramatic device, not a thinker, so it doesn’t align with attributing a theoretical claim about drama.